The Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR and the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) currently have postdoctoral vacancies as part of the RPA project, directed by Prof. Claes de Vreese and Prof. Natali Helberger.

'Personalised communication' is a term that captures one of the key developments in present-day digital communication. It is a phenomenon that presents a number of advantages, disadvantages and challenges, which we will examine in this research programme. On the one hand, profiling users and targeting them with customised messages may present a solution to certain challenges created by modern media, such as information overload and ensuing attention scarcity. Through personalised content, search results and applications (apps), consumers’ consumption patterns and profiles can be analysed individually; health information can be targeted to improve certain lifestyle choices and manage diseases; and political information can be adjusted to individual voter profiles. On the other hand, personalised communication can manipulate or bias information which, in the worst case, can deprive people of access to more meaningful or more diverse information. This can have a number of worrying effects or conflict with values such as our right to privacy and freedom of expression. Furthermore, personalised communication offers unprecedented opportunities for unfair stereotyping, discrimination and social sorting.

The RPA in its first years has generated a broad basis of scientific knowledge and is currently looking for a Postdoctoral / scientific programmer with an interest in the research area and a formal background in computer science/ data science or social sciences with extensive programming experience.

The researcher will:

• conduct (interdisciplinary) legal research;
• develop concepts to be tested empirically;
• work with existing data sets (survey data, tracking data);
• design and collect new data fitting within the project themes;
• work in the broader Personalised Communication team;
• complete scientific papers on this topic;
• contribute to the public debate, and organising outreach activities of the project;
• contribute to fundraising activities at the ASCoR/IvIR and the project.

The position is 32 to 38 hours (0.8-1.0 FTE) per week. An 0.8 appointment, possibly with .2 FTE teaching time.

The candidate should have:

• an advanced degree (e.g., PhD degree) in data science or communication or other social science with outstanding data mining and analysis skills. Candidates who are due to submit their dissertation before 1 September 2018 are welcome to apply;
• active research knowledge of, and expertise in, modern search and text mining methods;
• experience programming in at least one of the following languages: Python (2.7/3.x);
• experience with webmining/ webscraping;
• experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP) (Topic Modelling / Machine Learning is a plus);
• additional pros are database handling experience, Git skills, Bash scripting and / or elastic search/Hadoop;
• some teaching and supervision experience;
• excellent oral and written communication skills.
• team spirit, willingness, and commitment to do autonomous work in a multidisciplinary team, including communication scholars, legal scholars, and data scientists.

The position preferably starts 1 September 2018. It concerns, in principle, a two-year period after an initial test period.

For postdoctoral researchers the monthly gross salary, depending on your knowledge and experience, will range between €3,475 and €4,757 (Scale 11) based on a full-time basis.

We offer a pension scheme, a holiday allowance of 8% per year, and flexible employment conditions. Conditions are based on the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

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Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and Faculty of Law

The Research Priority Area Personalised Communication is a collaboration between the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR and the Institute for Information Law (IvIR). Both research institutes are among the leading in the world.